Life is cruel sometimes. Damn cruel. People are sick and dying. Good things are happening to bad people, my family has a beloved cat of 15 – longer than my children have been alive and my wife and I have been married (a birthday present for her in 2010 while we were dating) – in the last stages of life due to the evils of cancer.
Life is also beautiful – we are thankful for those 15 years, every moment of them, as we are all thankful for the time we’ve had with loved ones no longer with us. The knowledge that it ends brings about an appreciation of the moment we likely would not otherwise have.
That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t do anything, any of us, to buy one more day for whatever living creature we loved and have lost. When they are our fellow human beings, the fight for life takes on a special urgency, as we are the only creatures acutely aware of our own mortality.
To fight against that mortality, we have developed treatments, surgeries and prescription drugs to aid us in that ultimately futile endeavor. As evidenced by the horrible case of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams and his fight for treatment of his cancer, who needed to publicly ask the President of the United States for help in getting a drug treatment to prolong his life.
The President helped, which is excellent, but not everyone can avail themselves of a relationship with the President of the United States. The rest of us have to rely on a mix of health insurance and health care professionals, along with drug companies and the federal government.
One of the gatekeepers in that coalition, the last one, is failing in their duty pretty miserably.
The federal government’s participation in this alliance is working out to be more of an obstacle, an obstruction on the way to better health and more options, than people realize.
The MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) alliance has the absolutely correct objectives; they just don’t seem to be able to get far down the road in pursuit of their stated goal. It turns out the Food and Drug Administration might be the only institution in Washington, DC, more dysfunctional than Congress and conservative think tank leadership.
Rather than focusing on clinical trials and drug approvals, FDA leadership promises the world and then denies lifesaving care to American patients. The FDA is like everything in this city: high school with paychecks. Oh, and egos, you can’t forget the egos.
FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary promised hope for people with rare diseases, for example. He offered a “plausible mechanism” for faster approvals of pharmaceutical treatments.